[kentonv]

> Durable workers are still a network call over the internet.

Getting the request to the object involves traversing the internet. Once there, actually talking to storage is extremely fast compared to classical monolithic databases. The key is that application code gets to run directly at the storage location.

Most applications need to do multiple round trips to storage to serve any particular request, which is where the costs add up.

> Ultimately 40 ms doesn't matter because it's not something that the end user can perceive.

In ~2005 when I started at Google, I learned that they had done a study that found that every millisecond of latency shaved off the time it took to serve search results would add $1M in annual revenue.

Users may not perceive 40ms in isolation, but they do perceive a web site "feeling" slower if every request takes 40ms longer.